Stop Calling It “Ethnic Food”—and More Tips on How to Talk About Eating

“There are so many other words.”

Adalberto Roque/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Thai coconut curries and lemongrass soups often include pungent notes of a bumpy, thick-skinned citrus fruit called the makrut lime. English-speakers usually refer to it as kaffir lime. But even as the ingredient gains popularity, turning up in everything from cocktail recipes to soap scents, that moniker may be on its way out. As Slate writer L.V. Anderson explained, while the origins of the term “kaffir lime” are still unclear, the word “kaffir” is wildly offensive in many parts of the world. One version of “kaffir” comes from the Arabic word for “infidel” and after South African white colonialists started using it to describe black Africans, it became a racial slur on par with the “n-word” in the United States.

Considering the word’s sordid past, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s new food critic Soleil Ho made sure to include it in her list of “Words You’ll Never See Me Use in Restaurant Reviews.” “There are so many other words” one can use instead, Ho explains. Ho joined Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott and North Carolina-based freelancer Victoria Bouloubasis on the latest episode of Bite.

Ho is part of a crowing crop of restaurant reviewers who are rethinking food criticism. Though perhaps once thought of as the Switzerland of the journalistic world, food writing is increasingly dealing with the bigger societal issues diners and food workers confront, from racism to labor to identity politics and environmental concerns. The way we describe food matters, Ho writes: “As a writer who aims to improve my political consciousness and empathy toward others, there is a lot of use in simply thinking about how my word choice can help or hinder that goal.”

“Ethnic” is another word that won’t appear in her stories. “The imprecision of the word—and the assumption that it doesn’t apply equally to people and cuisines associated with Europe or white America—gives me such a headache,” Ho writes. Bouloubasis says she used the term early in her career, but now it makes her cringe: “It doesn’t make much sense—ethnic to whom, or to what?”

In the past, it has often been assumed that the readers of food criticism have been white and upper middle-class or wealthy. And that’s exactly the assumption that this new wave of food critics wants to fight against. Everyone eats. “One of my great hopes with my own writing,” writes Ho, “is for it to better reflect and respect the way real people live in the world.”

Hear Soleil Ho, Victoria Bouloubasis, and Tom Philpott discuss more words they’ve stopped relying on in this week’s episode of Bite podcast.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate